Week 3: The unconsciousness of ideology

In this week’s post, I want to think about Stuart Hall’s understanding of ideology and its relation to its “unconsciousness.” Spivak quotes Hall to make sense of the shift in US liberalism away from ethical imperatives of “class struggle” toward “human rights.” Spivak argues that this shift is in line with the neoliberal strategy of “peace through strength” cultivated in the Reagan/Thatcher days to accomplish the liberal imperative of securing human rights across the globe. Such liberal militarism promotes military intervention and “suppression of the savage” as a means to individuate and create conditions conducive to individuation (Spivak 352).

However, the machinery behind these contemporary liberal imperatives—the militarism, the “gender training,” “peace through strength”—is not hidden behind the veil of ideology in order to put out of view systematic exploitation or death. (In fact, this machinery is celebrated.) Spivak cues Hall’s notion of ideology to emphasize that ideology is not something concealed but manifest and legible. I would like to think Hall’s definition struck me as it had struck Spivak. I’ll quote it below and then move on to how I want to use it:

It is also crucial that “ideology” is now understood not as what is hidden and concealed, but precisely as what is most open, apparent, manifest—what ‘takes place on the surface and in view of all men.’ What is hidden, repressed, or inflected out of sight, are its real foundations. This is the source or site of its unconsciousness” (Spivak 352).

The liberal imperative of human rights is plain to see—in fact celebrated. We don’t need to dig it up in order to piece together its ideology. What is really “hidden,” according to Spivak and Hall, are its “real foundations,” its material bases, embedded in other economic imperatives of a late capitalism searching for new markets and new management strategies and retooling old colonial techniques of control and suppression for use in a “post-colonial” marketplace. These imperatives and processes form an ideology’s “unconsciousness.” Notice that the liberal imperative of human rights expresses itself as an ahistorical, universal mission of liberation at odds with its own embeddedness in its (historical) “real foundations.” US liberalism dehistoricizes and represses the other economic imperatives that may motivate such an ideology.

Spivak regards “literary reading” as a means of opening up sites of ideological unconsciousness. Through literary reading, therefore, we will be able to contest the “real foundation” of an ideology, to critique its cause rather than its symptom. Spivak emphasizes that the literary reading practice she has in mind involves regarding “literature as literature” that has a “singular rhetoricity of language” and does not deal simply in the realm of the referential or polemical. Reading literature as literature and “rhetorically sensitive approaches” train us (e.g. the reading public) to move between epistemologies, so that we are equip to resist getting stuck into one way of knowing. With this “flexible epistemological performance” we may contest forms of ideological repression (i.e. of an ideology’s “real foundation”) and leave open sites of unconsciousness.

Spivak proceeds, with this idea of literary reading in mind, to read Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy as an example of narrative governed by parataxis. I won’t reproduce Spivak’s reading here, but Spivak wields her reading of parataxis in Lucy to get at the foundations of cultural translation, empire, and colonialism. She argues that reading the particular ways in which we use language, rhetorically speaking, can reveal struggles over meaning and over the sites of cultural production that we may miss if we do not train ourselves to move among the epistemologies of various rhetorics.

Eric Hayot employs a “rhetorically sensitive approach” (one that I’m sure Spivak would endorse) to challenge Stephen Greenblatt’s privileging of anecdotes in New Historicist methodology. Hayot argues that the selection and citation of anecdotes in Greenblatt’s criticism take place within historical processes of “citational practice, racial stereotype, and narrative form.” In other words, Greenblatt’s rhetorics are not at all as self-evident as he may wish them to be; anecdotes do not simply emerge in a text and their reference to an event outside does not simply happen without a rhetorical framework that produces knowledge about that event in its own particular ways.

I’m interested in how the surface and distant readers would respond to Spivak’s rhetorically sensitive approach and her assertion that the “power of fiction is that it is unverifiable” (Spivak 369). I’m looking at Moretti in particular for whom distant reading is simply a process of verification, the testing of the presence of certain patterns, tropes, genre. Would he have been able to identify the presence of parataxis in Lucy? And if so, would his distant reading be able to make sense of how paratactic narrative organizes meaning?